Virtual folder/ contents across 4 HD's

[Homebuilder]

Hi,
I read somewhere about making a folder that is actually on more than one drive.

so the folder called: "video import"
Could be across all of drive x and drive y and drive z. Making one really large folder. to possibly MAP and to point Dirmon and other utilities to.

Right now, I have 2 import folders on two different drives and 4 sage recordings folders on 4 drives... would like an easier solution.

Anyone know about how to do this?

Thanks!

[Kanati]

think you are thinking of a virtual drive. That's what I have mine set up as.

That is done when you are formatting in windows disk management. I don't remember the exact procedure but I'm sure you can find it on microsoft's knowledge base or even in windows help. I *do* think you'll need to wipe the drives you currently have as I think it's created while you are creating the partition itself.

[GTwannabe]

What you're thinking of is a Dynamic Disk. You have to convert your Basic Disks to Dynamic Disks to enable disk spanning. However, Dyanamic Disks have some serious downsides on a non-RAID setup. First, you can't boot from a Dynamic Disk, so you need a separate drive for Windows. Second, if any one drive in your spanned Dynamic Disk volume borks, you lose everything in the whole volume. Third, Dynamic Disks cannot be read by non-Windows OS's, which makes data recovery from a failing drive difficult. Fourth, you can't downgrade a Dynamic Disk back to a Basic Disk without a format.

[TakeFlight]

You CAN boot from dynamic disks.

[mayamaniac]

Don't use dynamic disk unless you have a file backup system, either that or don't store any important data on it. If you don't care that one day you might lose all your recordings, then go ahead, dynamic disks will do exactly what you want.

In the future with Windows Vista, there's a builtin virtual folder system which may be a better alternative. I'm not 100% positive that it does what I think it does, but we'll find maybe late 2006 when Vista ships.

And I do remember reading that you can't boot from Dynamic Disks, are you sure its possible, TakeFlight?

[jominor]

Originally Posted by GTwannabe

What you're thinking of is a Dynamic Disk. You have to convert your Basic Disks to Dynamic Disks to enable disk spanning. However, Dyanamic Disks have some serious downsides on a non-RAID setup. First, you can't boot from a Dynamic Disk, so you need a separate drive for Windows. Second, if any one drive in your spanned Dynamic Disk volume borks, you lose everything in the whole volume. Third, Dynamic Disks cannot be read by non-Windows OS's, which makes data recovery from a failing drive difficult. Fourth, you can't downgrade a Dynamic Disk back to a Basic Disk without a format.

I had a brief dalliance with Dynamic disks. It is easy to setup and works as advertised, but the data issue is a very real problem. Our Sage systems tend to push hardware...hard. I've lost drives so often that now, I've got backup drives of my most important data, namely my divx'ed movies and OS installation. I would STRONGLY suggest having a rigorous backup system in place if you go this route.

[TakeFlight]

Originally Posted by mayamaniac

And I do remember reading that you can't boot from Dynamic Disks, are you sure its possible, TakeFlight?

I'm doing it right now on my SageTV server. Although I currently have no reason to be doing dynamic disks (I had planned on setting it up differently originally and therefore set up a dynamic disk). It's not hurting anything being dynamic. It's been that way for 1.5 years. See attached images. The first one shows the Disk Management screen and you can see disk 0 is dynamic and that is where my C: drive is. In the next picture you can see the C: drive in Windows Explorer to verify that is my boot drive and where Windows is.